In France, Isabelle Adjani has become an emblematic figure—admired,
scrutinised, sometimes reviled, the recipient of Best Actress awards and
of political abuse. But she's never achieved stardom outside
France, thanks to the mostly forgettable films in which she's
appeared. Of her twenty-odd movies to date, few have anything going for
them beyond her performance—and some, not even that.

This is surprising, since Adjani is an intelligent and dedicated actress
who chooses her roles with care and works on them with single-minded
application. Truffaut, who gave her her first significant screen part in
L'Histoire d'Adèle H
, observed that "she acts as though her life depended on
it." Intensity, the fierce wounded stare of a woman at once
independent and painfully vulnerable, is the essence of her screen
persona—and, on all the evidence, of Adjani herself. "One
acts nothing but oneself," she concedes, "no matter how
fiercely one denies it."

Adjani looks back wistfully on her work with Truffaut. "I
don't think things can happen so beautifully, so smoothly and with
such purity again." Even so, the film set the pattern for her
career in more ways than one. Casting Adjani as Victor Hugo's
daughter Adèle, who pursued an unrequited love beyond the brink of
madness, foreshadowed her frequent later roles as solitary obsessives,
alienated and victimised by a punitive society. But it also marked the
start of her edgy, love-hate relationship with the French public. Joining
the Comédie-Française at 17 to star in Molière and
Giraudoux, she became the youngest player ever to be granted contract
status. When, three years later, the company refused her leave of absence
to work with Truffaut, she walked out, causing vociferous outrage.

In some ways, Adjani's exceptional beauty has worked against her.
Small and delicate, with large, deep-blue eyes set in an oval face, she
has sometimes been reduced to merely decorative roles—the errant
socialite of Luc Besson's modish
Subway
, or The Player in Walter Hill's Melvillesque thriller
The Driver.
(Hill, she claims, "hated my scenes with Ryan O'Neal and
cut most of them out.") In
Le Locataire
Polanski, with characteristic perversity, tried to neutralise her beauty
with thick glasses and a shaggy wig, but only succeeded in smothering her
personality.

Adjani's fragile looks suit her for roles as emotionally or
physically exploited women—although neither James Ivory's
Quartet
, nor Herzog's brittle remake of Murnau,
Nosferatu-Phantom her Nacht
, offered her scope for much beyond passive suffering. More interesting
are the films that explore the darker potential of her wide-eyed gaze,
such as Claude Miller's
Mortelle randonnée
, where her serial killer, ruthless beneath an appealing facade,
captivates even the detective sent to track her down.

This ambiguous combination of tenacity, even toughness, behind an air of
childlike vulnerability underlies much of Adjani's best work. She
has never lacked courage, professional or personal, and in a 1986
interview, disgusted by the rise of Le Pen's racist National Front,
proclaimed her own non-French origins. (She was born in Bavaria to a
German mother and an Algerian father.) Public reaction was swift and
malicious: a rumour swept the country that she was dying of AIDS. Even her
appearance on television, alive and in furious health, failed to still the
whispers completely.

This ordeal fed powerfully into her playing of Camille Claudel. The film
was a cherished personal project: Adjani herself raised the finances,
acquired the rights, talked Depardieu into playing Rodin, and persuaded
her long-term associate, the cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, to turn
first-time director. Adjani closely identified with the brilliant
sculptress, destroyed by her affair with the egocentric Rodin and
incarcerated in an asylum for her last thirty years. The urgency and
fervour of her performance burst through Nuytten's careful
direction, and gained her an Oscar nomination. But in
La reine Margot
, a blood-soaked costume drama adapted from a Dumas novel, she was swamped
by the rampant melodrama and by a grandstanding performance from Virna
Lisi as her mother, the scheming Catherine de Medici.

So far, all Adjani's attempts to launch an international career
have misfired: besides
The Driver
there's been Elaine May's megabuck comedy disaster
Ishtar
, and
Diabolique
, a botched shot at updating Clouzot's classic chiller. In France
she seems trapped by her persona, by a public regard at once too indulgent
and too censorious. Highly regarded by her colleagues—John
Malkovich describes her as "a great actress . . . one of those
people who really work from a deep sense of
woundedness"—Isabelle Adjani has rarely found the scripts,
or the directors, to stretch her abilities to the full. Since
Diabolique
, and the media feeding frenzy over her break-up with Daniel Day-Lewis,
she has been involved in just one film,
Passionnément
, and may be preparing to retire into Garbo-like reclusiveness.

—Philip Kemp

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